On a Saturday afternoon in December 2010, a German shepherd named Blue snuffed along a parkway
near Gilgo Beach, a few miles from New York’s Fire Island.

His partner, a Suffolk County detective, had him out on a training session just before the first
snow. The tail wagged, and the dog started digging. He pawed down to burlap.

There were four burlap bags, each holding what had once been a young woman who sold sex on
Craigslist. Two had gone missing that year, one in 2009, the earliest in 2007. Eventually, a fifth
body was found in a nearby marsh.

Six months before the fifth skeleton surfaced, Robert Kolker, a reporter for
New York magazine, wrote a riveting piece called
A Serial Killer in Common. It focused on the slain, and the mothers and sisters they left
in their wake.

Kolker’s book about this story is the recently published
Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery.

For some, he notes, “To say the victims were just Craigslist hookers” earning $200 an hour made
them “practically interchangeable — lost souls who were dead, in a fashion, long before they
actually disappeared. There is a story our culture tells about people like them, a conventional way
of thinking about how young girls fall into a life of prostitution.”

Lost Girls asks instead that readers pause over the arc of five short lives and consider
the way the Internet has greased the transactional aspect of prostitution.

The well-structured book helps its reader keep track of a welter of families, aliases,
alliances, street characters, conspiracy notions and an unnervingly insular gated community called
Oak Beach, from which the fifth victim was seen fleeing six months before Blue nosed up the first
cadaver. Long Islanders will be particularly engrossed by a 21-page section called “Interlude: Oak
Beach, 2010,” in which Kolker digs below the gloss on this seaside outpost of 72 homes, where “a
woman had gone around the neighborhood banging on doors and screaming bloody murder before
disappearing into the night.”

That woman was Shannan Gilbert, 24, who grew up in upstate Ellenville. Shannan’s mother fobbed
her off into foster care, apparently because the child displeased one of the mother’s boyfriends.
Shannan was pretty and smart; she graduated from high school early but also had a beau who broke
her jaw. For protection on Manhattan sex calls, she hired a driver who pocketed a third of her pay.
On the night she disappeared, her driver was her regular: Michael Pak.

Kolker writes, “Michael would pull up to some prearranged corner, and she’d pile into the SUV
with all her stuff: a tall soda from McDonald’s, often spiked with vodka; a bag with extra clothes;
her purse; a book from one of her online college classes; and a netbook she’d use to post and
refresh her Craigslist profile.” Such detail adds welcome complexity to these women.

This isn’t pleasant reading, but it never feels gratuitous.

Kolker seems careful not to critique prostitution. But we hear the howl of the victims’ families
clearly enough.